


Slowly But Surely

by tipsybluetips



Category: Captain America (2011), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Get Together, Grief/Mourning, M/M, and the rest of the avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 09:12:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tipsybluetips/pseuds/tipsybluetips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the sterile smell of lies that has Steve running from the bed of his awakening – it’s the totally different <i>everything</i> that stops him. Still, he just keeps on fighting because this, no matter where or when, is what he does best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slowly But Surely

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece a couple of months ago under request in a play-meme thing with my friends. Ada, the sweetheart who got Tony/Steve out of the raffle, requested me fic with the song "Shattered" by Trading Yesterday as inspiration. This is not a songfic though, it was just my prompt. I hope I've done this fandom and these characters justice.
> 
> Also, this fic will be massively AU as soon as the movie comes out this weekend, but we all know this is very close to the subtext Marvel has been basking in from day one.

It’s the sterile smell of lies that has Steve running from the bed of his awakening – it’s the totally different _everything_ that stops him, slowly but surely since his legs still work for a few more steps, as if going a tad bit further would suddenly make the world of metal and mirrored glass turn into the brickwork of Brooklyn. But when he does stop and the city goes right on without a blink for his confusion and the gut-wrenching feeling that nothing will ever feel familiar again, Steve wishes for the lie if only for a moment.

  
Then the man he will come to know as Fury catches up with him, wielding aircraft and weapons not even the most inventive movies had ever pictured, and Steve lets the truth roll over him, wave after wave of impossibility and absurd solidifying into reality.

When Steve crashed that plane he’d been ready to die. He can’t stop thinking of how, in countless ways, he did.

*

He works out fastidiously to rid his body of seventy years of late exercise, and reads every piece of history SHIELD allows him so he can at least pretend to guess where commonplace things come from – he’s glad to know segregation is no more, and women have the same rights that men do, and nobody can be kicked out of the army for loving someone of the same sex. The fact that man actually walked on the moon never ceases to amaze him. On the other hand he’s still out to know if he agrees with most wars fought after the one where he perished – too much ideology for too little actual gain for the people, too much economic influence for too little human interest –; he is wary of the way the news show on television as a never-ending stream of truth that cannot be checked or contested; he is staggered to learn the size of American public debt and know there are still people living no better than his generation did during what they call the Great Depression and Steve calls his childhood.

Nonetheless he practices, and prepares, and tries his best to adapt, because he knows Nick Fury didn’t unbury him from his icy grave out of the goodness of his heart. He’s putting something big together – big even for the standards of this time – and he needs Captain America for it to work properly. Not Steve Rogers, not really, because it’s easy to see the years have created plenty of resources that make his enhanced physique little more than a nice addendum to a combatant, and his military experience rivals but doesn’t squash any of the agents roaming the base, and the stubborn Brooklyn boy who is as much of an artist as he is a fighter holds no interest to any sort of armed forces. No, Fury doesn’t need Steve, but definitely Captain America and everything propaganda has made him be beyond himself.

The Avengers Initiative is presented to him as something he might have a choice in partaking or not, and Steve knows such courtesy is just a way to goad him more quietly into his intended role. He doesn’t say it, but Fury needn’t have bothered – he will do it because he is a child separated from his parents in a crowded carnival and he knows no better. SHIELD offers him something to do out of this borrowed present, and he wonders if the future he is asked to change once more will be so kind to, this time around, remain as hypothesis and speculation until he’s truly dead.

Steve doesn’t want to learn the consequences of his deeds by history books ever again.

*

He asks Coulson about Peggy once, on one of those days when nothing makes sense and he wishes he had the wisdom of the ninety-year-old man he should be, but he’s never had the chance to.

A few minutes of research later, the good agent quietly offers to take him to her gravesite.

Steve nods at him and deliberately lets the opportunity to be a greater man slip by, wordlessly retreating to the gym to train until not even the walls can take any more of the loss of what he barely ever had. If sweat isn’t the only thing sliding down his face he’s not worried, not ashamed, neither much of anything he’s ever attempted to be.

That night he sleeps with his back to the wall on the SHIELD standard quarters, leaving space to the bride he’s mourning before even courting. He wakes up a widower of his own life, and finds the training room refurnished for his destructive purposes.

He feels ridiculous, and decides he’ll bring her flowers. As soon as all of this is over.

*

He meets the rest of the team and five minutes into the briefing Steve knows why Fury makes such a point out of his presence. These battles will be public, not a war fought between armies of trained soldiers but right into civilian places, with civilian bystanders and civilian casualties and civilian opinion running high – and the team is not charismatic. They can’t even inspire Fury and the man has brought them together in the first place, they shouldn’t even get started on reassuring people scared into submission that the Avengers are able to bring their lives back to normal. He knows he wouldn’t trust the future of Earth to two trained assassins, a rampaging scientist, an alien god and “Big man in a suit of armor, take that away and what are you?”

Stark doesn’t even bat an eyelash and Steve has to hold onto an involuntary reflex to punch the living lights out of him, “A genius billionaire playboy philanthropist.” Thor and Hawkeye are laughing, Black Widow is rolling her eyes, Banner has his face on his hands, and Steve knows he’s supposed to be the poster boy of this insanity because no one else in that room even remotely qualifies, but that doesn’t make coping with Stark’s attitude any more pleasant.

“Good to know that at least you’ve not included ‘responsible adult’ in that list, or we’d really be done for,” and he knows he shouldn’t, Fury has given him a short file on each of his teammates and that was clearly marked as a landmine, but he’s not one to deal with insubordination. Not without a very good justification at least, and keeping Stark’s ego inflated doesn’t quite make the cut, “At least your father could be trusted when it really mattered.”

There’s silence for a second, then two, five, more, and Stark finally opens a smirk that wouldn’t be so ugly if it were the scowl it’s really meant to be. “So good we’ve established I’m not my father,” he growls, walking one step into Steve’s personal space to stare right through him, “and I’ll never be.”

Strangely enough his retreating steps make it sound like a promise.

*

The last time he fought may officially have been seventy years prior, but for Steve it was five weeks ago and he’d been knocking down a dissident Nazi branch with their own captured armaments. Now there are flying jets spewing light beams down Times Square that leave Hydra’s meanest equipment looking like scrap metal, besides a scorned Norse god making the land of the free bend to its knees, and he’s supposed to take it all down due yesterday.

Good thing he’s always been the best at making do with whatever is at hand. “Hulk, toss me!” a split second later he’s hurled straight into the air, shield first into a robotic gunner, then he uses its crashing carcass to jump onto the next target. He’s airborne for over a minute just by busting enemies this way, rinse and repeat, until they finally catch up with his game and break it by simply not being there when he somersaults towards the next one – and suddenly he’s falling, fast and hard and from over fifty feet with no chance of stopping it and-

“Careful there, princess,” Iron Man’s filtered voice loses not one ounce of Stark’s humor as he catches Steve bridal stylesome scant inches before he hits the ground, “you’re prettier if you’re not a stain on the road.”

He drops Steve off on the rooftop of a tall building before an answer comes to him, and Captain America is not about to break communications protocol just to tell Stark he’s an idiot no matter what MIT says on the matter – he just keeps on fighting because this, no matter where or when, is what he does best.

The Avengers may be the most dysfunctional unit ever brought together, but they get their job done by the end of the day – or as done as it gets with Loki still on the loose, but SHIELD will accept all the victories it’s entitled to. Therefore he poses for the cameras when they think he’s not looking, helps the science personnel collect enemy tech for analysis, nods at Hawkeye and Black Widow and a still greenish Banner, lays a friendly hand on Thor’s shoulder for a minute. Stark is already off, late for one board meeting or another across the country.

When the heat of battle washes off he’s back to his modest, neat, impersonal quarters, all alone, trying hard not to remember the drunken laughter of men long dead in years long gone.

*

It takes Loki throwing Tony out of the top of Stark Tower for Steve to realize Iron Man is as committed to this project as any of them are – in fact, he might just be a bit more in his own peculiar way. He’s got more at risk, money and reputation and free reign and life, all of that jeopardized willingly to assist a military incursion that shamelessly feeds off his intelligence and resources. Though Tony is a self-centered pain in the ass, Steve is happy to know Thor is there to catch what his brother dropped.

“I didn’t take you for the envious type, Tony,” he smiles a peace offering as the thunder god settles his retrieved team member on safe ground, “just because I can’t pull road stain nicely, it doesn’t mean you should try and top me off.”

“Oh you know what it’s like,” Tony brushes his T-shirt from imaginary dust, smiles like he’s forgotten how to actually do it but he’s making a genuine effort, “we follow on the steps of our role models and whatnot. By the way, great catch big guy, with that and your swing you’re like a whole baseball team into one godly vessel. Ever thought of trying the big leagues when we’re done saving the universe from your brother’s daddy issues? I could totally manage you.”

Steve knows what to make of being the role model of a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist superhero only as far as Thor gets that the baseball babbling is Stark’s way of saying thanks.

*

Nothing is over; even so Steve finds himself holding a bouquet of white and pink roses in front of a tombstone, standing on a quiet little cemetery just outside of New York. The sun shines evenly over the world people keep insisting he should save, and everyone who ever knew him as no more than a good man is gone.

“I loved you,” Steve tells Peggy, regardless of her hearing it or not, because it makes him someone he likes better.  
The echo of things that never were mingles with the rustling leaves, then fades – if not forever, at least long enough.

*

In the clearing they are all reduced to sheer, blinding stupidity. The recon mission is a failure – Loki tricking them into wasting time at best, throwing them out of the equation for a moment so he can attack at worst – and being played doesn’t settle nicely with any of the three Avengers roaming the patch of forest, each in his own way.

Iron Man doesn’t shut up for a minute, acid sarcasm the very oil of his gears, until he finally insults Loki enough that Thor – hurt since day one by the stance they’re taking against his brother, and only bearing it on the belief he will eventually talk the trickster out of his madness – gets really cross and pushes Tony with a very loud complaint about his lack of any idea of respect. It’s proof of Thor’s might that the armor actually budges, catching Tony by surprise. He’ll never get used to be talked back on his bullshit.

Especially because, as it turns out, there’s always someone to cushion the fall for him – and Steve surprises himself to be that person that night. He certainly doesn’t stand for Tony’s phrasing and attitude on the matter, but Thor’s stubborn faith in Loki’s regeneration is going to be a fatal liability to the team faster than Steve can preach ‘emotional pitfall’ – but when he says so he sounds angry, impatient, the frustration of the day joining arms with the tiredness and damaged control of every single hour since his awakening, and his last truly coherent thought is that he’s looking for a fight and he’s pathetic.

Then they’re at each other, a grade school tussle glorified by state of the art technology and legend. Thor’s descending blow is the first thing that ever worries Steve about the endurance of his shield, but it holds. A blink later Tony is blasting Thor away from him and through a tree – only to catch a flying Mjolnir right to the faceplate, which effectively shuts Iron Man’s systems down.

The tossed shield hits Thor on the stomach and he falls again, while Steve runs to the unmoving armor with newfound terror burning his gut. “Tony! Tony, are you okay?”

“Rebooting!” comes Tony’s voice, muffled by his metal casing, unfiltered by his mask, human. They are all so fragile, no matter how much they toughen up against the world. “Watch it!”

Thor is on his feet, right hand wrapped around the handle of Mjolnir –and the hammer won’t come off the ground. He pulls, again and again, however it won’t budge. The god’s eyes widen, impossibly blue and young, and suddenly Steve feels so spent he could return to the ice.

“What the -” Tony starts, once again wholly functional despite the slight cave-in on the helmet, but Steve stops him with a hand right to the shining panel on his chest. They watch in silence as Thor kneels beside the symbol of his strength and honor, eyes closed tight while his forehead touches the handle end, deep in contemplation.

“Words cannot convey,” he says minutes later, clearly, firmly, but nowhere near as full of his usual pride, “the depth of my regret for this disgraceful demonstration. I have been a fool.”

Steve thinks not one of them still holds any shred of dignity, thus he nods gravely at the repenting Asgardian and decides to at least try to be a leader. “You’re not the only one who has, friend. But we need your heart to be set if we’re going to do this together,” Steve sighs as he collects his shield, before stepping onto Iron Man’s feet and hooking an arm around the bulky armor. This is uncomfortable is so many ways he’s just not up to thinking about it anymore. “Iron Man and I will leave you to think things through, but communications are open. Just call us if you need anything. We all have to clear our minds. Tony, fly us out of here.”

It’s a relief to meet no resistance from Iron Man – he nods to Thor, then slides an arm around Steve and takes off. Tony is quiet all the way back to the base, what on itself is strange but Steve is grateful for whatever is disturbing the billionaire this time around. Only the howling wind competes with his internal battle, the crashes of barely-caged rage and whispers of failure and snorts of cynical resignation that create a cacophony in Steve’s mental landscape.

This is not who he wants to become, not in the least – but finding who he wants to be instead is too hard. This era makes good men wonder what goodness is and soldiers fight for no precise cause, hence Steve’s fatigue at trying to be both things and achieving neither one.

Eventually they reach the Helicarrier so Steve has a hot shower and a sparse bedroom to look forward to, except that Tony hesitates to drop him off. “A drink will do us some good right now,” Tony keeps holding him while hovering some feet over a landing port, and Steve has the impression he might be embarrassed in such a situation if he chose so. He isn’t, and has no intention to be.

“You know I can’t get drunk,” is all he says, half a smile making way onto his face. Iron Man’s metal frame has grown to be afamiliar map of uncomfortable hard edges against his body, and even that is welcome when no contact at all is the alternative. The world is too distant for him – personal space for SHIELD agents is about ten times the efficiency radius of their most lethal technique, and even the average New Yorkers will try their very best not to brush against anyone in a crowded subway station. Steve, child of busy baseball games on the street and man of military barracks through rain and mud and hardship, is used to closer relations.

It’s no wonder Tony Stark, finest specimen of the twenty-first century man, is the one to offer him the closest treatment he’s gotten so far – through countless layers of metal plate. “I can drink your part and you can drive my car on the way back, how’s that sound?” if one looks close enough, it’s not hard to see Tony’s mannerisms even when he’s wearing the armor.

“What car? I don’t see any garages,” Steve raises him an eyebrow, which is quickly answered by the repulsors firing full blast once more as Tony speeds toward Manhattan.

“Stark Tower ETA: three minutes, and then you won’t need to see any other garages in your life.”

Steve wants to be disgusted by the absolutely mindless money spending Tony’s collection implies – it would be easy, obvious, instinctive and natural. Tony is not meant to be read with simplicity, though. Steve tries his best to see beyond loud wealth, and finds it’s not so hard to understand this must be the only way Tony knows how to be a friend.

It’s a strange, distant world indeed, nowadays. Steve is through with not belonging in it.

Tony gets wasted, a few shots too many for every hour they spend at this club where girls’ skirts are too short, and guys’ shirts are too tight, and people’s conversation is stilted by the loud series of sounds they insist on addressing as music. Still they talk, nothing special, just a release valve for Tony’s deranged humor and Steve’s craving for connection. It’s much better than it has any right to be.

Steve is driving a sleek blue Lamborghini back to Stark Tower when he receives Coulson’s message questioning him about Thor’s unprecedented quiet mood – he lets Tony, who is little more than a wobbling mass of dark hair pressed against his shoulder, answer it. He knows exactly how unwise such a decision may prove to be, and he doesn’t find it in himself to care.

Tony’s lingering warmth is a longed-after surprise when Steve helps him stumble into his suite, a faint prickle of registering memory radiating off his arm.

Although Tony’s guest room is as hollow as his dorm back at headquarters, for once since he came back Steve doesn’t dream he is at another time and place, living a life that ceased to be.

*

He’d like to say the battle is but a blur behind his eyelids, but Steve has always been graced with nearly photographic memory and it’s not a far bet to assume the serum improved his cognitive and record abilities along the other changes. He remembers every explosion licking at his legs and each enemy falling under his shield; he remembers the energy rays zooming past his face and the commanding platform eclipsing New York; he remembers people’s screams and a giant flying serpent coming toward them like the end of it all had just arrived; he remembers Clint falling then Tony catching him, and Tony falling then Hulk catching him, and Natasha wounded like her fiery hair has grown longer as red spills down her neck and back, and Thor wounded by the look of utter despise in his brother’s eyes when his stolen staff is taken from him – he remembers it all with the same clarity held by Peggy’s lips against his.

Steve remembers they’ve won, fair and square, and he smiles at the thought – but when he curls up in his bunk that night, he can’t help but feel that nothing is truly over.

A minute, or possibly an hour, of sleepless contemplation rolls past Steve. He wishes he could tell anyone besides his mission report what he’d done, what it had been like, what went through him on those moments when everything was lost but he simply wasn’t able to stop.

It’s nearly sundown when his cellphone – accepted and studied as everything that is defining of this time, but hardly Steve’s most useful possession – rings. He’d like to be surprised at the caller ID, but just then he realizes he’d been waiting for it all along. “’Couldn’t sleep either?”

“Sleep is for the weak and we’ve busted the Jotun prince and his evil minions back whence they came about ten hours ago. I can sleep when I’m dead,” Tony’s voice is a smile, sideways and arrogant, charming in its tactless honesty. He could have been dead a million and one different ways about ten hours ago, but neither Avenger needs to mention it. “Catch you in ten.”

It’s not a question, but Steve doesn’t need it to be one. “We’re going somewhere quieter tonight,” they do facts instead of hypothesis much better, anyway.

“Whatever you say, princess,” the phone clicks shut, and Steve slowly throws on some jeans and a T-shirt with only half a mind to it. He’s sure the SHIELD guards are supposed to track his movements, but when he leaves the premises nobody troubles him - maybe it’s because he’s Captain America and he’s saved the world that day so he’s got a free pass, but Steve has no doubts Fury can listen into his telephone connection. He wonders what the Colonel means by that.

Tony makes a show out of stopping the convertible Cadillac in front of him in one swerve of the wheel, and Steve jumps onto his seat with willingness he hasn’t felt for way longer than he can tell. A donut and a thermos of coffee are shoved onto his lap – Tony has grease stains on his face and arms all the way to his rolled-up sleeves, but Steve takes a bite all the same. So far this is the best reward he’s gotten for saving the world, thus he wonders where honor and a sense of accomplishment could possibly fit. “You look like a mess,” he informs dutifully as Tony speeds off.

“A hot one,” Tony throws that shit-eating grin of his in Steve’s direction, and it shouldn’t feel as familiar as it does. “’Bet I look like one of those pin up models you guys used to like so much – I even got the whole domestic bliss objectification going on. Tony, the greasy mechanic. Maybe we could make you Steve, the good guy rescuing kittens off trees. There should be calendars of it; tattoos, too. But we’d need guys with arms like Hulk’s to fit nicely.”

Steve tries to imagine Tony posing as one of the girls Bucky wallpapered his barracks with, then he’s laughing like he’s just learned how to do it and it’s wonderful. “Just promise me you won’t be in lingerie,” liquid awakening spreads through him as coffee reaches his stomach, however Steve can’t avoid feeling like he’s entered some sort of deranged dream state. He trusts himself not to grow insane the same day his only assigned purpose of existence comes to an end, though.

“I don’t make promises I can’t keep,” and the best part is that every single one of Tony’s jokes has a background of truth.  
Silence slowly wraps itself around them but it’s comfortable, expected. The streets are as empty as New York will ever get and Tony is not one to mind the speed limit – he hits the gas even harder as they drive past the crumbling remains of the earlier battlefield, and Steve forces himself not to remember where Clint almost lost a leg and where Tony almost crashed or where Natasha almost broke her neck. He refuses to remember how Bucky almost held his hand a few long months – decades – ago.

They drive into Brooklyn, and in the grey light of the earliest morning it’s easier to see where everything changed, where everything is the same. Deep down Steve is nothing but a Brooklyn boy, and that weights with bittersweet forbearing in his chest – nonetheless he keeps munching on his donut until Tony slows down.

They’re at the sea side, not that far from Coney Island. Although they’re not entirely alone, the wash of the ocean is louder than the few cars rolling past Tony’s improper parking spot on the boardwalk, and the elderly group practicing Tai Chi is a good hundred yards away from them. The view of the ocean is clear and the fading night sky gradually becomes grey, then green, on the horizon.

“You’re a sunrise kind of man, then.”

“So are you. But I like seeing them from the wrong side of the sleeping pattern.”

“There’s no wrong side to a new day.”

As they watch the sun burn red and gold and unchanged over the water, Steve finds he even believes that.

*

He visits Peggy’s grave again, with a new bouquet of white and pink roses. Instead of three stilted words, however, he tells her of everything that is beautiful and to be cherished in this time, of his impressions on national and world politics, of his respect and admiration for his team, of the astounding chance he has to fight for freedom and justice even when such concepts have changed so much beyond what he once represented.

Steve talks himself hoarse to her grave. He can smile softly, with relief and wonder, as he returns to the base.

*

It’s the rich mix of sensations that makes Steve pause –the scent of cologne and machine oil, the taste of coffee and bubble gum, the press of full lips and scratchy beard. That pause can’t last, though, because it’s Tony kissing Steve from a bench on his lab, with Iron Man laid in pieces before him, and just like the tide of time he doesn’t wait for anyone.

It’s Tony kissing him and it was never meant to be, but it is.

It’s Tony, change personified – a man of his time – and Steve of all people should know nothing needs to be perfect to be right.

It’s Tony so Steve kisses back, slowly but surely, with a resolve of restored hope.


End file.
